Thursday, January 25. 2007
Someone needs to remind them that they are humble scribblers who earn their pay checks by selling ads, and are not gods. Powerline explains.
 What's this "imbalances of power and knowledge" baloney? Sounds like Marxist/feminist college faculty Foucault-style horse manure.
And speaking of the late-lamented Foucault, how many boys did the famously promiscuous, AIDS-infected prof lure into his room "to discuss theory"? Just asking..., not judging. Laws like this (WSJ, by Volokh - h/t, Althouse) which tell you who you can date are what convince people that government has grown not only overly intrusive, but overly arrogant and overly stupid. Read Volokh's piece, and then tell me whether any of that could not equally apply to lawmakers, politicians, lawyers, bosses, personal trainers, rich folks, veterinarians, co-workers, professors, electricians, colonels, Maytag repairmen, and even Presidents. A quote: Of course medical relationships offer room for various kinds of abuses. In some situations, it may be proper to interfere with people's right to marry, and their sexual and romantic autonomy, in order to prevent those abuses. We can talk about relationships between psychotherapists and clients (or ex-clients), or relationships between doctors and current patients, or other circumstances in which the risk of subtle coercion or unprofessional behavior is especially high (which is to say materially higher than the risk of subtle coercion and other harms in any sexual relationship). But the trouble here is that the rules go vastly further than these special situations, and vastly undervalue the countervailing reasons to limit regulation--people's right to choose whom to date, have sex with and marry, even including their dental hygienists, opticians, and the like. So much for the right to marry; so much for sexual autonomy; so much for consenting adults deciding whom to love, without the fear of losing their livelihood.
I see nothing at all wrong with doctors having relationships with patients, nor with therapists having relationships with ex-patients. People are adults, and can use their brains and choose what to do. Such issues are not issues for lawmakers, but for ethics committees of professional boards. (Isn't it odd that such laws never apply to us lawyers, who, rumor has it, are famous for getting involved with clients?) Look - in any two people, you can find an "imbalance of power" if you want to. And in any desired romantic relationship there will be "subtle emotional coercion:" it's called "trying to win someone's heart" (or at least their company), aka "courtship." All is fair in love and war. Furthermore, never forget this basic biological truth: a charming female always has mighty, witch-like power over a man's emotions - and she knows it. It's Darwinian. Why do some folks, mainly feminist-types, try to deny this most basic fact of life? Guys cannot help thinking about new opportunities to play Hide The Salami, and women are suckers for romance. Chosing to act on these things is another matter entirely - or should be, but it's none of the government's damn business. Image: My witchy dental hygienist during lunch break. What fellow would not want to invite her to dinner, even after she has been a co-conspirator with your dentist to torture you and then to empty your wallet?
Wednesday, January 24. 2007
Guess which one was not charged in the London bomb plot? (from a piece at Squaring the Boston Globe) 
It was disconcerting - or at least distracting. Somebody speculated that it was Morse Code.
From Today's Boston Globe: Senator John F. Kerry plans to announce today that he will not run in the 2008 presidential race, and will instead remain in Congress and seek reelection to his Senate seat next year, according to senior Democratic officials. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, plans to say he will remain in the Senate to recommit himself to efforts to extricate the United States from the war in Iraq.
 Quotes from a new piece in Prospect:
Modern liberal societies have weak collective identities. Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation. But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challenged by migrants who are more sure of who they are.
and Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism's silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups. Hobbes and Locke, for example, argue that human beings possess natural rights as individuals in the state of nature—rights that can only be secured through a social contract that prevents one individual's pursuit of self-interest from harming others.
Read the whole thing. Image: Maybe Sharon Stone wants you to read this piece.
Tuesday, January 23. 2007
Saddam obit completed:
Hussein was predeceased by two sons, Uday and Qusay, and is survived by 17 sons: Sooflay, a restauranteur; Guday, who lives in Australia; Huray, a sports fanatic; Sashay, who is gay; Kuntay and Kintay, twins living in Africa; Sayhay, a baseball player; Ojay, a stalker and murderer; Gulay, a singer and entertainer; Ebay, an internet entrepreneur; Bejay, a male prostitute; Biliray, a country music star; Ecksray, a radiologist; Puray, a manufacturer of kitchen blenders; Tushay, an Olympic fencer; Raygay, who lives in Jamaica; and Tupay, who is bald, and by seven daughters: Lattay, a coffee-shop owner; Bufay, a big eater; Dushay, owner of a feminine-care-products company; Phayray, an actress; Safeway, a grocery store owner; O lay, who lives in Mexico; and Gudlay, a hooker. There is reportedly another surviving son, Oyvay, but he has been disowned by the family.
Monday, January 22. 2007
Powerline tells the sad truth you might not have known about Gandhi, and the sad truth you do know about Jimmy Carter.
Hitchin's piece in City Journal begins thus (thanks, H): Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call. In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
Every word in it is worth reading.
Sunday, January 21. 2007
 The magazine Psychology Today, which, mind you, is not a professional journal, is determined to spread the word that conservatives are all crazy, and liberals sane.
Our contention at Maggie's Farm is that anyone with certainty about anything is nuts, and many folks with great uncertainties are also nuts. So, anyhow, we will all confess to being quite disturbed. A-RAB: (As Psychiatrist) Yes!
Officer Krupke, you're really a slob.
This boy don't need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society's played him a terrible trick,
And sociologic'ly he's sick!
ACTION
I am sick!
ALL
We are sick, we are sick,
We are sick, sick, sick,
Like we're sociologically sick!
So, now we have confessed to our mental instability which renders us probably undeserving of the vote and parenthood, and which likely would open the door to permanent Social Security Disability. But now Iron Shrink debunks the entire study that created the story in the first place. Gee, that's surprising. It's here. (h/t, Michelle) Well, even if Iron Shrink is right, we are still crazy after all these years - and nobody can take that away from us. Image: Engraving of Bedlam from Hogarth's A Rake's Progress
 Oh my God! She he it Billary announced!
What a shocker. She's only been running for President for 15 years. This is not exactly a "fresh face," is it? I'd gladly vote for Condi, but I cannot stand this condescending, calculating, manipulative person. There is something in her voice and manner which says "I am better and smarter than you." No you ain't. The only differences between me and you, Hillary, is that you are intoxicated by power, and I am not; and that you are a ruthless, mean bitch, and I am basically a fairly nice guy.
Saturday, January 20. 2007
 I heard the NYT's Frank Rich interviewed on 770 radio this morning, by Mark Simone, about Rich's new best-seller, The Greatest Story Ever Sold.
Rich is no dummy, but he is a knee-jerk partisan. For example, when Simone pointed out that the Clinton administration viewed Iraq in the same way - as a global threat and as a threat to the US, Rich dismisses that as irrelevant. Rich's main point seems to be that the war was "sold" on the basis of flawed intel because the neos wanted the war. Of course the war was "sold" - leaders always have to "sell" wars because civilized people hate war. FDR was one of the great Music Men of world history. He could sell almost anything, but even he needed Pearl Harbor to "sell" the US on the war that he had long wanted us in, in Europe. Bush couldn't sell water in a desert. But Rich wants to talk about the flawed intel about Iraq's threat. Fine - it was flawed. But intel is always flawed. In life, we always act on incomplete information. This flawed intel was believed by the UN, the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. You have to go on what you have, and you have make a decision. The buck stops somewhere. And the risks of inaction, in life, are usually comparable to the risks of action, even though passively-inclined folks are reluctant to accept that fact about life. Odd, is it not, that so many are prepared to take us back to the stone age because of highly speculative and politically-driven ideas about man-made global warming - but those same folks don't want to see the danger of the Moslem imperialism which is on the front pages every day? Were the neos biased towards nation-building in the Middle East? You bet. They still see it as the best path towards peace and long-term stability in the Middle East. Is it a fantasy? I don't know. But I still think Clinton would have gone into Iraq if he had had the stomach for it (and, if he had, I have no doubt that Rich would have defended that decision). Based on the interview, the most important flaw in Rich's case against the war in Iraq is that he does not put it in context of global Moslem imperialism, of which Jihad is one particularly malignant piece. Rich does not want to talk about Afghanistan, or Iran, or the whole "circle of fire" -from Chechnya to the Balkans to Lebanon to Somalia to Indonesia to Thailand - that Bernard Lewis talks about all the time. Not relevant. What? It has even reached France, now. And gee, I almost forgot - New York City and London too. It's getting to be a big circle. Iraq, like all wars, was/is debatable - especially with 20-20 hindsight. Saddam foolishly called the UN's and Bush's bluff, and discovered that it was no bluff. "Don't mess with Texas." Thus in the spirit of Dr. Sanity and others, and borrowing the idiom of Al Gore, I will use the term "Jihad Deniers." Is Islamic imperialism a serious danger to us or not? That is what it all comes down to. Clearly Rich, in his current positioning, thinks it isn't. Many will wish to agree with him - until the next catastrophic attack brings the truth home again that it's not all about oil, and that it's too big for the police. But if you think it's all about oil, then don't be a hypocrite - quit driving and flying. And if you believe it's all about the Jews - then dump Israel overboard (down the well?). But, IMO, neither of those would help one bit. Oil wealth is what funds Jihad - especially from the Saudis: it ain't about poverty - it's about wealth, power, and religion. A war of cultures, as they say. But the world will not give up their Texas tea until it runs out, and that will not be for a few centuries, at least. I think it is a danger. Not a threat to get hysterical about, and yet a threat to be forceful about and to use force to address. Every detail may be debatable - as was regime change in Iraq - but the guesstimation of threat is the bottom line. Jihad will continue to be a danger to the world, long after Iraq is finished. Our debates will continue, as they should, but shameful partisan sniping - gotcha games - is not honest and serious debate. Our governments and our military will be facing these issues for many years: our protection is the main reason we have hired them (the Left seems to always want to forget that is what national governments are for - we could do everything else we might want to do locally), but we cannot expect perfection from them. Clinton and Albright tried the limp-wristed approach, and it didn't work out well. Bush is having trouble too, by trying to wage a "limited, compassionate" war. Who has a better idea, other than dhimmitude?
Friday, January 19. 2007
 Dr. Sanity gets it. Please read her piece: it's a classic. You go, girl.
And, by the way, Christ did not say that money is the root of evil. He did probably express the idea that love of money is the root of evil. The point being that love of anything more than love of God was a path to hell and a path to a rotten life. Indeed, in Christianity, loving anything or anyone more than God is sin. Luke 9: 57 As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, "I will follow You wherever You go." 58 And Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." 59 And He said to another, " Follow Me." But he said, "Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father." 60 But He said to him, "Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God." 61 Another also said, "I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home." 62 But Jesus said to him, " No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."
A very demanding fellow, Jesus. Christianity invites us to be "in the world, but not of it." I think money, especially spare money, is a wonderful thing and the route to personal power, autonomy, freedom, and choice. Like guns, the money we have and the wealth we have represent our personal independence. The creation of wealth in capitalism is a remarkable phenomenon - like alchemy, we can create wealth out of nothing but using our brains. In the piece, she quotes Atlas Shrugged: "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Thursday, January 18. 2007
 A reader referred this piece on Soft and Hard People at Am. Thinker today. I have many thoughts about this truthful piece, but I'm too tired to write any more tonight. Quote:
... a juxtaposition of Abu Ghraib and Muslim beheadings tells the tale, as too many of us are epitomized by panties while our adversaries are by swords. While they bat nary an eye at the torture of an innocent, we eat ourselves alive over the humiliation of the guilty. But what is truly humiliating is when the hard people laugh, watching the soft people play the fools, bray at one another, and commit cultural suicide. And make no mistake, they laugh. Why do you think the Mexican government distributed literature instructing its citizens on how to best violate our southern border? Why did Islamists issue advice on how to play the victim card in the American legal system? They don't tolerate such under their dominion, but they know about our lawsuits, protests, pandering politicians and capitulating clergy. They know the game. They know us. And they don't really think we're barbaric or unjust. They think we're weak and stupid. Soft people and hard people, two sides of the same world. Of course, we were harder too, a long, long, long time ago. But it would be nice to find that happy medium, something that seems ever elusive. A bane of man is that he jumps from blind prejudice to blind tolerance and back again, without ever making a stopover at the ethereal land known as enlightened distinction.
LaShawn, on Duke again. Althouse on the Duke fiasco. They are making the old "fake but accurate" case. She quotes the NYT here: Critical race theorists, who are on the faculty at almost every major law school and are producing an ever-growing body of scholarly work, have drawn from an idea made popular by postmodernist scholars of all races, that there is no objective reality. Instead, the critical race theorists say, there are competing racial versions of reality that may never be reconciled.
Oh, I see. Stealing Pontius Pilate's line. Quite original. Indeed, as News Junkie says, universities have become sanitaria. And Duke is the Harvard of the South, right? Or is it Harvard is the Duke of the North? I forget. They have good roundball though (Duke) - also good lacrosse, I have heard. Sports may be the only areas of sanity in these places. Final comment: How come everyone preaching about the racial divide is white? If black Americans are incomprehensible, why are whites talking so much about them? Or this that a "white" question?
Wednesday, January 17. 2007
Arnold asking for Fed disaster relief for frozen oranges. What a joke. Is he a girly-man? The ranchers didn't ask for Federal for their frozen cows last month. Correction. Woops. Thanks, Reader. The Ranchers were girly men too. Are we now an entire nation of girly-men?
 When you see this sort of thing, you have to wonder whether we are getting all of the news that's fit to print.
Iraq's Disneyland.
 Statistics of global warming: Why Global Warming is a crock. Am Thinker.
I find, as a rule, that whenever one is feeling a bit too good and feels the need for a migraine, or a case of Acute Exasperated Flummoxification, try discussing climate with someone who knows no math or science. Image: A young palm tree which recently sprouted up in downtown Rutland, VT's Veterans's Park.
Tuesday, January 16. 2007
 Hadn't realized that Bill of INCD Journal is in Fallujah. From all I have heard, a truly God-forsaken place.
In his way to Iraq, he had the kind of conversation with someone who equates the US with terrorists - the sort of conversation we all can fall into, and then regret. Try explaining the Jacksonian view of the world to a young Icelandic pacifist woman. Bill links to a fine essay by Walter Russell Mead on The Jacksonian Tradition, which I highly recommend, and will re-read. One quote: If Jeffersonianism is the book-ideology of the United States, Jacksonian populism is its folk-ideology. Historically, American populism has been based less on the ideas of the Enlightenment than on the community values and sense of identity among the British colonizers who first settled this country. In particular, as David Hackett Fischer has shown, Jacksonian populism can be originally identified with a subgroup among these settlers, the so-called "Scots-Irish", who settled the back country regions of the Carolinas and Virginia, and who went on to settle much of the Old West—West Virginia, Kentucky, parts of Indiana and Illinois—and the southern and south central states of Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Jacksonian populism today has moved beyond its original ethnic and geographical limits. Like country music, another product of Jacksonian culture, Jacksonian politics and folk feeling has become a basic element in American consciousness that can be found from one end of the country to the other.
I am a Jacksonian. I feel like the guy in Bourgeois Gentilhomme who learns for the first time that he is speaking prose. Whole essay here.
 Meyer, on the new book Reagan the Crusader, at RCP. A quote:
Reagan was elected president of SAG seven times - which makes him among the most successful union bosses in American history, by the way - and as a result he probably engaged in more negotiating sessions with hard-headed corporate CEOs and egomaniacal prima donnas within the union itself than anyone ever elected to the White House. No wonder that, years later, Reagan ran circles around the Kremlin - and around a Democratic-controlled Congress. (Someone once asked the President if it was tough negotiating with the Russians. Reagan replied, "No, it was tough negotiating with Jack Warner.")
The Soros Media Surge. Dem. Project
Monday, January 15. 2007
 I never was a big fan of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am sorry to say that in Yankeeland, King's Birthday means a 3-day skiing weekend at Okemo, Stratton, Stowe, Sugarbush, Loon, or wherever (if Bush-Cheney-Halliburton has not cancelled all snow) - and little more. I have always been a fan of treating every person with the human respect and consideration they deserve, depending on what they are made of and on how they lead their lives. Being a bit old-fashioned, I still believe that skin color is a matter of no interest or importance whatsoever. If I were a black guy, which I would not mind at all, I would thank my lucky stars, and God, that I lived in America - Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. However, racial equality is important - freedom of opportunity to be the kind of person you chose to be. King's politics were terrible, and I totally disagree with all of them. Why should black folks want socialism any more than white folks? Other than to get the benefit of the exertion of others? Alas, the lure of easy money crosses all human distinctions and categories, doesn't it? But segregation was truly wrong, and I give King credit for courageously taking the leadership of the movement to get rid of that dehumanizing tradition in the South. It was long overdue. Someone had to do it. I'm glad he did, and I am very sorry that he, a man of God, was killed by ignorant, low-life rednecks in doing it. Were he alive today as a grey-haired old guy on Hannity and Colmes (which I wish he were), I think I would still disagree with everything he might say. Still, one heck of a preacher, like his Dad. God rest his soul.
 Reposted from Feb, 2005
This excellent, personal essay by Rogert Scruton appeared in The New Criterion in 2005. A classic, and one to which many of us recovering liberals can relate. One quote: By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope. One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.
Please read it, if you haven't. We like Scruton. Image: Scruton receiving an honorary doctorate in 1998.
Is passivity always the best response to aggression? Dr. Helen discusses Ace claims Dems will trade deaths for votes. Will the US Survive until 2022? Derbyshire at New English Review. Among other things, he discusses multi-ethnic nations, and central govt incompetence. A quote: Certainly our federal government inspires little confidence. I have a sheaf of credit cards in my wallet, any one of which my local merchants can validate with a quick swipe. Why cannot a prospective employee’s social security card similarly be validated? Because private corporations are approximately 100,000 times better—more efficient, more capable—of doing anything than is the government. In the 1990s I had a job which required me to make occasional phone calls to banks and investment houses, and also to the offices of federal regulatory agencies like the FDIC in Washington. To call a private company with a request, then to call a government agency, was to step through a horological time warp. A business would deal with me more or less well (sometimes less well, to be sure), usually in a single call. To get the equivalent response from a government agency needed a whole week of calls. If anyone picked up the phone at all, I would hear a slow, indifferent voice, irked at having its game of Solitaire interrupted, saying: “She ain’t here today… Oh, he left early…” Would my contact be in the office next day? “Hard to say… I guess…”
Are humans becoming smarter and more moral? Kling thinks so. I'm a skeptic, but he makes the case at TCS. A quote: But perhaps the focus on scientific ideas still misses a key component of economic growth: improvements in the human species. As we get wealthier, we also become enhanced physically, cognitively, and morally, leading to a virtuous cycle of improvements to the standard of living. As the economy improves, human cognitive ability and moral reasoning improves, which helps markets to work better and makes the process of innovation more productive, leading to greater wealth, more mental and moral development, and so on.
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